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Let authors know how many people reached which page, (and in doing so, which page did players stop playing from). Storygames have a unique advantage over traditional books in the sense that they can record player metadata. If an author can see that a large number of players dropped off at a specific point (e.g. an unfairly difficult puzzle) it can help them improve their games. As of now the only data available is number of times the game was opened, and number of times someone submitted a rating. Both data points are appreciated, but really not as helpful as something like page-wise analysis

Impact factor 8/10

too many cookies. too many people blocking cookies / cache and also having to use bandwidth to report user statistics to the server and bring them up for the author.

Nah, I could do this with the database, I think. No cookies necessary. This is a cool idea. Can anyone think of any reason not to make it publicly available instead of just to the author?

May as well make game saves public. Slap it on the profile somewhere besides the sidebar because that'll get nasty quick xD

Game saves already do this, so this can be done just by telling the author where people saved. idk why they would want to know where people quit since that can get inaccurate very easily. People just exiting out of windows for all sorts of misc reasons would create inaccurate data; but game saves are like "this is how far they got before they saved"

could make for some interesting statistics.

Once again, let's not assume all players are members who are able to save games upfront. It'd be interesting to see how many players (including non-registered members) jumped off at a certain point

Also, authors have no access to where people are saving their games.

For now, inaccurate data > no data. We can refine the model later

That's why I'm saying authors (and people in general if this is put on profile pages) should have access to where people saved in a game.

What's the advantage of seeing savegames publicly? Say, if I know you have three savegames in Magellan 1, 2, and 3 how does that help me as an author who want to write a specific genre?

Is this not to see where people left off in a game? If you can access people's saves you can see where they saved and left the game.

Well, you wouldn't need cookies, and it is likely that the server is already tracking this information in one way or another. The trick would be to get the data to a place that it can be useful. If you have an especially complex story, seeing how many people reached each page might not be that useful because you won't know how they got there. And then I'm not sure how you can track items and item usage... you'd almost want an action path that each reader followed, and I don't know how to capture that.

That's fair, however I'd argue that games using items are a subset of the larger number of games not using items. It'd be nice to know who jumped off where, games using items perhaps could be solved for later as this system matures?

IS tracks page views. I always kind of liked that detail.

For whatever reason I actually find it pretty fascinating to see what paths were chosen and what endings people got, etc. I've played around with ideas for keeping track of what choices a player went with using variables, but it's nothing that would be practical for anything but a short game.

I experimented with something similar last year that sort of worked, and let me track ~30-40 decisions in a 7 or 8 digit number. I'm not sure how high scores go, but it would scale up with longer numbers. Any kind of backtracking would break it though. I'd also only see the number if someone left a comment, which most people don't. It took way too much time to set up for something that was only a curiosity, so I scrapped the idea and decided it only made sense to track endings.

With all that said, I would really enjoy this idea and would definitely make use of it. 

Thanks! If it wouldn't be too much to ask, along with a page hit counter, would it also be possible to have a link tree for playthroughs, basically showing which links were clicked in which order (bonus points if we can also see how long they were on each page)? Again, the goal is to give more power to authors to learn them learn from their readers' behavior (the way Kindle currently helps authors, they even keep a meta track of how many people highlighted what text, but that's not relevant for us). The one advantage real life authors currently have over us is that they can see a person who's reading their book IRL and gauge their expressions and interest. Ours being an online medium, we don't have that ability, but analytics would help us get a good proxy through data.